Pat Buchanan to Bush: Thanks for All the Jobs

The godfather of paleo-conservatism, a man who ran against President George W. Bush in 2000 and endorsed him in 2004, unleashes the fury against the ex-president’s economic record.

The only relevant comparison is to Herbert Hoover… Beginning and ending in recession, the Bush presidency added a net of 407,000 private sector jobs over eight years, less than 51,000 a year, the worst eight-year record since 1927-35, which includes the first six years of the Great Depression.

By January 2009, the average workweek had fallen to 33.3 hours, the lowest since record keeping began in 1964.

From Jan. 31, 2001, through Jan. 31, 2009, 4.4 million manufacturing jobs, 26 percent of all of the manufacturing jobs in the United States, disappeared.

Buchanan’s solution to all of this: more economic protectionism, and expunging the “hoary myth that Reed Smoot and Willis Hawley caused the Great Depression.”